Dealing with scrapers: when people steal your contentOne of the great things about the social web is the culture of sharing that it fosters. One person writes a blog post; another quotes it, disagrees with some parts, corrects a passage or two, and adds some more information; a third synthesizes it all into a cool infographic. It's a little like the coolest potluck dinner in history.
But every great potluck dinner seems to attract the folks who have no intention of cooking a damn thing. They're there to gorge on as much Jell-o salad and chicken fingers as they can before someone notices they didn't bring any dishes themselves.
And in the Web world, we call one particular breed of these people scrapers.
Scrapers prowl the web for content, scoop it up and drop it in their own blogs/forums - often without attributing it or linking back to the original source. Scrapers gloss over the fact that it's essentially close to plagiarism.
Like most authors, we're usually happy to see our work reaching a wider audience. That's why we blog, and why we publish the news.
But authors deserve credit for their work, and thinkers deserve credit for their ideas. (For that matter, we deserve to be held responsible if our ideas end up a little wonky.)
How to tell if your blog is being scraped. If you use a search engine and an article that has been composed by you and it ends up with a link to another forum or blog. Like karcar does. Check it out and confirm for yourself..
Fortunately, scrapers usually want their work to be visible to search engines. And that makes those same search engines your allies in hunting down sites that are taking liberties with your content.
Been scraped before, or feeling especially vigilant? Conduct periodic manual searches on distinctive phrases in your most recent blog posts, and see if they're turning up somewhere they shouldn't.
When you do find hits, ask yourself if you're really being scraped, or if this qualifies as fair use. One big question to ask: is the site that uses your content claiming it for its own, or acknowledging you as the writer and linking back to you? If the latter, and they provide a link. then they may still be violating your rights, but at least they aren't total plagiarists.
